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JoAnne S Lake

Beyond Embarrassment

Synopsis

JoAnne’s story is engaging. It inspires, while offering suggestions for managing life’s hurdles. In an honest, will-to-succeed style, this journey focuses on neurogenic bladder and bowel condition in which a person lacks control due to a brain spinal cord or nerve condition. The source can be aging, a chronic health condition, trauma, or many other causes. Often called an under active or over active bladder or bowel, its symptoms vary but the difficult daily reality is shared.
• Valuable guide, much like a fresh prescription filled with practical advice
• Educates, empathizes, and encourages women who struggle with the same health issue
• Written with a girlfriend-to girlfriend feel, sharing the path to survival and success
• Sprinkled with Tips and Knowledge Nuggets that high light points of importance
• Encouraging and equipping the reader to live every day to the utmost
With medical input from expert medical research librarian and Biosleuth, Julia Parker, readers will discover current research and facts equipping them to meet their medical challenges and work with their medical teams. Valuable for healthcare professionals to share with patients

Author Biography

JoAnne Lake, a farm girl from Prunedale, California, is an insistent patient (forthright and wordy) because she is one of millions people in America with bladder problems and wants to start a conversation. She likes to tell it like it is.
The secret of her success is embracing the state of affairs with luminosity and honesty by taking the punch away.
JoAnne does not want to be remembered in connection to the toilet, yet she sees toileting dysfunction as the last frontier of subjects that needs to have a mature conversation. Her writings come from life experiences and emotions as a patient, mother, educator, and friend. After journaling her private thoughts and feelings, she started writing a highly successful blog in 2012 to educate and inspire others with bladder and bowel problems. This is her first book.
Visit JoAnne Lake (as Trudy Triumph) at her website www.TrudyTriumph.com

Author Insight

An Attitude Change was in Order

Now I am bold when it comes to my health story, this is new for me. I have not always felt this way. At first I was horrified then embarrassed by my diagnosis of neurogenic bladder. After trying to learn more about this condition I got mad because I could not find information on how to live a normal life and started blogging. I didn't care what I wrote about because I had a pen name, Trudy Triumph. Much later when I decided to write a book, my editor, suggested I try to start the book with my hardest day ever. This first sentence, of the first paragraph,of Beyond Embarrassment, was my "horrible day story" because I did not want anyone to know. I was ashamed. Working at a school is like working in a fish bowl.

Book Excerpt

Beyond Embarrassment

That Monday, I came to work full of trepidation. I had become exasperated over the weekend as I fumbled and said words that I should not have said, all because I had spent long hours in my home bathroom learning to use a woman’s intermittent catheter. I cried several times out of the sheer frustration. My new toileting routine took so long. I felt like I had been given a life sentence to a porcelain throne.

Today would be my first day to use a catheter at work. I had only minutes to find a private place and wash my hands; only then could I struggle to unwrap the lubricant, unwrap the catheter, and then finally find the small orifice on my body to insert it. Thinking about finding that spot on my body made me sweat, though the day was cold.

Walking through the halls of the high school that day, I felt like a freak. I chastised myself for drinking the extra cup of coffee at daybreak. There was little time to catch my breath let alone use the restroom, even on a good day. Worrying about how I would manage emptying my bladder within a fifteen-minute time frame was not what I wanted to think about as I started my day.